A new Amazon cloud service announced Tuesday could help companies with legacy applications have an easier time taking the leap to the cloud.

Amazon Web Services General Manager Matt Wood announced the new Application Discovery Service, which will allow companies to easily analyze legacy applications running on their data centers. It will help companies start the migration of their application data up to the cloud, and then work with one of Amazon's partners to get their applications running in AWS.

The service lets users identify their applications and the infrastructure dependencies of those applications and then measure a performance baseline of those applications operating on-premises before companies consider moving them to the cloud.

That's not to say the entire process is automated, however. The service, announced at an Amazon conference in Chicago, is meant to detect a customer's needs and then hand them off to a partner who can help shift an application to the cloud.

The service will be available in preview in the "coming weeks," according to Wood.

It's a competitive move that showcases one of the key differences between Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud wars. Microsoft is fine with its customers running applications on-premises because of its continuing investment in related software, but it's in Amazon's best interest to focus on getting customers to migrate to the cloud.

What remains to be seen is which cloud providers businesses will choose to go with. Also unclear is how often companies will be willing to port applications to the cloud when they have already invested a great deal in on-premises infrastructure.

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